


Letters to the Dead

by bofurrific



Series: Hobbit Drabbles [38]
Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, M/M, letter therapy, stages of grief, that's a legit thing right, writing letters to the dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-15
Updated: 2013-01-15
Packaged: 2017-11-25 16:10:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/640647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bofurrific/pseuds/bofurrific
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kink Meme Fill</p><p>Bilbo writes letters to Thorin over the years.</p><p> </p><p>It takes Bilbo Baggins 80 years to get over Thorin Oakenshield.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Letters to the Dead

It takes Bilbo Baggins eighty years to get over Thorin Oakenshield.

For all that Bilbo had longed for his hobbit hole, his books and armchair and garden, it feels wrong when he steps through his door, like pulling on clothes he’d outgrown, or a new pipe that lacked well-worn teeth grooves. He finds himself sitting alone at his dinner table, too many empty chairs crammed into the small space and he sings to himself when he clears the many unused dishes he can’t help but lay out for supper. “That’s what Bilbo Baggins hates.”

The overwhelming pressure in his hobbit hole, that crowds around every movement and leaves the air heavy, is the silence. There is no raucous laugher, no flutes or fiddles or drums, no late-night stories of lost kingdoms and great battles, and Bilbo doesn’t quite know how to deal with all of the quiet he had so mised on the journey. He finds he cannot sleep without the snores of his dwarves in the night. And when he does find sleep, he jerks awake, voice hoarse and screams still on his tongue; dreams of warg howls and dragonfire, or shining stones and so so much blood, of lies told and words unspoken, of promises broken and trusts betrayed, and so damned many things left unsaid.

He writes Balin a letter, a few years after he returns to the home under the hill that feels less than a home in the mountains and asks after the others. He invites them to join him for dinner some night, to toss his mother’s dishes through the air and pillage his pantry and fill his hole in the ground with song. He realizes, too late, that he has asked for Thorin’s harp to be played, for Fili and Kili to joke with him and tell him stories of their youth. He has forgotten that they are dead. This letter he shreds and throws into the fireplace. He makes himself go to bed without supper and wets his pillow with tears long into the night.

Bilbo welcomes the shunning he receives from several well-to-do hobbit families, uses it as an excuse to hole himself up underground and wish for rougher company, for mountains and woods and great cities of men. It crosses his mind, from time to time, that he could set off on his own again and visit his remaining dwarves so far to the east, but there is a monument there in Erebor, built to honour Thorin and Fili and Kili, and Bilbo does not think he has the heart to see it. And so he stays in Bag End and withers away, pining for the dead.

It is Gandalf who suggests it, writing letters. He visits the former burglar one mid-summer’s eve and is taken aback by how gaunt he has become, soft and sad where once there was light in his eyes. He rests a hand on Bilbo’s shoulders and tells him that it is not right to mourn forever, that Thorin would have wanted him to live, and in a very unhobbitish move, Bilbo snaps at the wizard, demanding to know how he should know what Thorin would have wanted. He regrets it immediately, of course, but Gandalf will hear nothing of his apologies. Instead, the wizard places a bit of parchment and a quill in front of the hobbit and suggests he write to Thorin and to others, to get some of this poison of his system, to get it all down where it can’t hurt him anymore. Bilbo thanks him and sends him on his way, but think he’s cracked, writing to the dead.

But after two weeks the parchment is still there on his table, and with a sigh, Bilbo sits down and picks up the quill.

I hate you. Is the first thing he writes, and he stares at the line once it’s written in sort of shock at himself. But a part of him does. He hates Gandalf for dragging him out his front door and onto this journey that was so wonderful and so terrible. He hates the dwarves for making him love them, for turning him from a respectable hobbit into one that dreams of adventures and gold and dragon hoards. But most of all, he hates Thorin. For not believing in him, for making him fall in love with his stupid princely self, and then for leaving him, for dying before they could make things right. And he hates himself for letting all of it happen. And so he writes all of this down, this anger and hatred and hurt, lets it pour from his inkwell across the parchment until it runs dry the tip of his quill scratches dryly because the anger just isn’t through.

Bilbo is trembling when he finally stops and the anger is shaken out of him. He places the letter in a drawer and goes to bed exhausted, and there are no dreams this night. When he wakes, there is a lightness in his heart and he has no trouble eating breakfast or tending to his garden or making smalltalk with his neighbors. It doesn’t fill his heart with rage to look at Thorin’s map, and although he is still sad, it is a manageable thing, and he even frames the map and hangs it in his drawing room.

Bilbo’s favourite cousin, Primula, dies in a boating accident, and Bilbo brings home her young son, Frodo. The Took blood runs so strong in the young one that it makes Bilbo ache some nights to think how he would have enjoyed the dwarves. He spends long nights recounting his journey to Frodo, and the wide-eyed fauntling clings to every word, asks after the dwarves and why they never come to visit, and Bilbo does not have it in him to explain the things he’s done.

Frodo is sleeping and Bilbo looks around Bag End, the Baggins legacy, and sighs. He takes out another roll of parchment and sits down with his inkwell and talks to Thorin once more.

There is no anger this night, but there is grief. He tells Thorin that he would gladly give up Bag End, even to Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, for just one more conversation with him. He wants Thorin to meet Frodo, wants to see his nephew play with Fili and Kili, even if they would be too old now to really play, wants their music to give Frodo hope and joy and pain and longing the way it did him so long ago, and Bilbo writes that he would give up anything, his home and his gold and everything short of his life, to see his dwarves again, and only not his life because he has someone to depend on him now, but if Frodo were at home with his own parents, Bilbo thinks, he would give his life so that Thorin could reign as king under his mountain, so that Fili and Kili could grow old and the line of Durin could pass on.

He shakes his head as he finishes this letter, tells himself he is twice a fool of a hobbit, and shuts it away with the first one bearing his anger and hurt, and heads off to bed. He doesn’t see the curious blue eyes of his nephew peering around the corner.

Bilbo writes no word to Thorin for many more years and Frodo never asks. But his patience grows thin the older he gets and his hands are often finding a plain gold ring that used to sit on the mantlepiece and now is never out of his pocket. Bilbo plans his birthday party, eleventy-one, quite a respectable age for a hobbit, and ignores Frodo’s protests that the others in hobbiton proclaim him unsociable. 

He doesn’t look a day older than he did at fifty, maybe a few more wrinkles and a shade of grey to his hair, but nothing like what should have happened, but he doesn’t feel as young as he looks. Bilbo feels old and stretched and weary and it takes so much effort to get up in the mornings, and more than age weighs in his heart. There is much sadness there, much grief.

On the eve of his grand party, his decision to leave the Shire and join the elves (of course the elves, who fascinated him but without the pain of living with the dwarves, without the memories) Bilbo sits down at his table and pulls out a roll of parchment.

He tells Thorin how much he misses him, although he doesn’t think he can quite get the measure of grief across, for there are no measures for how much he misses Thorin, how much he regrets their last moments. Bilbo writes that some days the pain of loss, although over fifty years ago, is still so sharp that it seems there is a dagger caught where his heart should be, that even looking to the east where Erebor lies, is enough to bring tears to his eyes. He apologizes for being so weak in Thorin’s eyes, such a sad little hobbit who cannot handle losing someone who was never really his to begin with. Their relationship, a slow build from hatred and hurt to a confession of love on a deathbed, never got the chance to blossom, and Bilbo grieves for it as much as he grieves Thorin himself. 

When he finishes this letter, it is half unintelligible for the tears spilled over it, and Bilbo buries his face in his hands and weeps for everything they lost, everything that never came to be, for a good hour when it is done, cries himself to sleep there on his table and the letter sticks to his face when Bilbo wakes him the next morning. Frodo, he can tell, wants to ask after the letter and his uncle’s swollen eyes, but he refrains, lets Bilbo shut it away with the others and clean his face, and they get ready for the day. Bilbo looks lighter than he has in a decade, even with red-rimmed eyes, like he has cried out all the grief he carried in him, and he is the gentle uncle Frodo remembers from his childhood who took him in, and not the bitter hobbit that has lived in Bag End these past years.

Bilbo leaves for Rivendell and Frodo stares around the empty house. He forgets about the letters for a few months until he is cleaning out his uncle’s desk and finds them. They make his chest hurt, to read the rage and hurt and pleading of his uncle, for these dwarves he’s grown up hearing of. He starts to understand, by the final letter, just why his uncle had never wed. It wasn’t because the lasses of the shire wouldn’t have him, as he had always assumed, but because he had given his heart away long ago to a king, and had buried it with him. Frodo hurts for his uncle, has to wipe his eyes when he’s finished, but he understands Bilbo now.

When the quest is over and done, when the ring is destroyed and Samwise has a family to look after him, Frodo takes Bilbo’s hand, old and withered and clawed, and takes him to the boats to set sail for the grey havens. He sees a letter on his uncle’s desk and the name catches his attention. To Thorin. It is short, just a few lines, and glancing over it fills him with emotions he thought he was done with. But Bilbo is smiling and he folds the letter up in his jacket pocket and lets his nephew take his arm and join him on his next adventure.

_________________________________________________________________________________

The Letters: Denial

My Dear Balin,

Home is not quite the same without all of you here. Isn’t that insane, that I should missy such rowdy houseguests? In fact, I think I should like very much if you and the company came to visit. If, of course it won’t put you out. I promise I won’t complain if Fili and Kili toss my mother’s dishes about. I miss your music, Balin. Have Thorin bring his harp if he can manage to leave to throne for long enough, all right? Do Fili and Kili still play pranks and tell jokes, or have they outgrown them?

_________

Anger

I hate you. I hate all of you. I was a respectable hobbit and you dragged me out of my home and half across the land for your mountain and you aren’t even here to rule it. It’s not your mountain anymore. You made me love you, you idiot and then you crushed me and you left me. You died over a STONE you fool. And how dare you, how dare you confess your love to me on your deathbed? How dare you forgive me and love me and then leave me to deal with it all? I hate you, Thorin Oakenshield and I hate that I can’t even hate you properly because I love you so much.

____________

Bargaining

Thorin,

I would give anything to see you again. What is it that I need to give up, Thorin? Bag End? Lobelia Sackville Baggins can have it, and you’ve heard my stories, you know how much I despise that woman. She can take it all if it means I can see you again, just one conversation, one kiss perhaps? I never got to tell you that I love you too. I have a nephew now, Thorin, and I tell him about you and your amazing deeds. You would love him. He’s got more Took in him than I have, and you’d have been prouder to have him on your quest than me, I think. I wish you were here, you and Fili and Kili, and they could play with him. I doubt they’ve outgrown it. Frodo needs your music. I don’t have the skill you possess. You filled me with such joy and longing with your voice and your harp and I wish to give the same gift you gave to me to Frodo. I’ll give up my home, by gold, my life if I didn’t have Frodo here to take care of. You and Fili and Kili are worth more than some silly old hobbit.

______

Depression

Oh Thorin,

It has been sixty years since I last looked on your face and it burns like I lost you yesterday. There aren’t words, Thorin, for how much I miss you. I cannot look to the east, cannot pass by your map, without stumbling over myself in tears. I think there is a dagger somewhere still in my chest from that battle and I don’t think I can ever remove it. I must be so weak to you, still mourning after so long. ANd you were never really mine, were you Thorin? You loved me and I you, but I wasn’t yours and you were not mine. I grieve that as well, my love, the things that never came to be. I would have followed you into to mountain, would have served you, my King, but now you are gone and I think I must have buried my heart with you in Erebor.

________

Acceptance

I still miss you, my love, but it won’t be long now. I will see you soon, Thorin.

\- Your Bilbo.


End file.
